Obama HHS deputy has recent lobbyist past

President-elect Barack Obama’s pick for deputy secretary of Health and Human Services was an anti-tobacco lobbyist as recently as September, a vocation that at least rides the fine line of Obama’s ethics principles.

As a leader of the Obama HHS transition team, Bill Corr, who lobbied as executive director of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, appeared to break an Obama transition rule that prevents lobbyists from serving in policy areas they have worked to influence within the past year.

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Questioned about the apparent discrepancy in November, the transition team explained that Corr’s work as a lobbyist didn’t violate the restrictions, an example of how the tough-sounding rules can provide the president-elect with plenty of wiggle room.

And on Tuesday, a transition spokeswoman said that as deputy secretary, Corr would recuse himself from tobacco-related issues in compliance with the president-elect’s ethics guidelines.

“It’s hard to drum up anger at someone who’s lobbying against kids’ use of tobacco,” said Taylor Lincoln, editor of Becoming44.org, the blog of government watchdog group Public Citizen. “There is a difference between being a lobbyist as a business, where you’re getting rich being a lobbyist, and being a lobbyist for a relatively modest income for an ideological belief.”

In a statement on Tuesday, Obama praised Corr as having the “depth of experience and commitment” to tackle health care reform.

Corr was chief of staff under HHS Secretary Donna Shalala during the Clinton administration and worked as chief counsel and policy director for former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, now Obama’s pick to head the department and the new White House Office of Health Reform.

Like Daschle, Corr must be confirmed by the Senate.

“Under the leadership of Tom Daschle and Bill Corr, I am confident that my Department of Health and Human Services will bring people together to reach consensus on how to move forward with health care reform, and I look forward to working with them in the days ahead,” Obama said in the statement.

Left unexplained in the announcement, however, was how the transition will handle Corr’s lobbyist past. He had unsuccessfully pushed Congress to give the Food and Drug Administration the authority to regulate tobacco. But because the legislation granting that authority failed, there is no link between Corr’s lobbying and HHS policies, a transition spokeswoman explained when Corr was announced to help head the HHS transition team.

Asked whether it created a problem that Corr would be in charge of reviewing HHS after having lobbied to increase the authority of the FDA, which falls under HHS’s jurisdiction, the spokeswoman, who did not wish to be identified, said it wasn’t an issue because the HHS secretary and FDA commissioner are confirmed separately by the Senate.

Also, she said, Corr had agreed to recuse himself from tobacco-related issues. As deputy secretary, he would continue to recuse himself from these issues, which is consistent with Obama’s policy, a transition spokeswoman said Tuesday.

The president-elect has pledged that no political appointees “will be permitted to work on regulations or contracts directly and substantially related to their prior employer for two years.”

Daschle’s work as a paid adviser at the lobbying law firm of Alston & Bird also appears to bump up against this pledge. His firm has earned more than $16 million during his tenure representing some of the health care industry’s most powerful interests before the department he’s in line to lead.

“We are still in the process of structuring the ethics rules for an Obama administration, but it’s clear that those rules would require recusal from any regulation or issue at Alston that he actually worked on,” transition spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said last fall. “We will meet every commitment made during the campaign."